How Easy It Is To Forget
by Ghanaperu
Summary: "Forgetting is the easy part. Forgetting is the natural part, time moving on and the human brain recognizing the realistic future as not needing those memories anymore, human emotions growing tired of clinging so tightly to such aching things." A reflective look at the Pevensies, starting with their first return after LW&W and ending a month after VotDT.


How easy it is to forget…to be thrust back into the world that was home Before, without any tangible reminders of what you left behind… Who wouldn't forget? So the only thing they have is their memories to rehearse with each other, the stories as they recall them and nothing else. The first month is easy, because Narnia is all they talk of. Everything is vivid in their minds, vivid enough to wake them up at night with the gentle whispers of ghosts and things that are no longer there. But that clarity can't last long, because our minds are built for resilience. They're built for protection, for moving on and forgetting.

So the natural order of things continues on and the present becomes more present and the past slips farther into obscurity, until one day Lucy tries to remember the words to the Song of Homecoming and the second verse has slipped away from her. She asks the others, and they find that they cannot remember either – the song is gone, lost to them. Lucy cries and Susan proposes, rather sensibly, that they should write down everything they remember so as not to forget it, but there is far too much to write and none of them has the heart to start. Who can find words for describing war? For explaining twenty-year friendships? They still remember too much.

Bits and pieces are lost as time goes on, lost from all of them. Their collective memory gets smaller with each day that passes, until the only clear memories are the stories they have rehearsed often enough so as to become fixed. The famous stories, the highlights…everything else is mostly gone, and only surfaces in strange moments, random flashes of memories that don't make any sense any more. When they tell each other the stories of Narnia now, the details are blurry and it is only the general idea of it that comes through, the feelings they felt when it all mattered so much. Now…now it doesn't seem so important. After all, Narnia is gone to them.

Forgetting is the easy part. Forgetting is the natural part, time moving on and the human brain recognizing the realistic future as not needing those memories anymore, human emotions growing tired of clinging so tightly to such aching things. Forgetting is the easy part – it's remembering that is difficult. And so it happens that as Edmund picks up a sword for the first time in a year and tries to remember what it was like the last time he was this age, how agile and skilled he was in battle, all the other memories come spilling over and he is suddenly overwhelmed with the sounds of dying creatures screaming and the eyes of the enemy's children and the soft velvet against his skin swishing while he paces next to the ambassador…a lifetime of forgotten things rushes through his veins and he swings the sword in a single intuitive arc. His opponent is sufficiently impressed to believe that they are truly the Kings and Queens of old, but Edmund hands the sword back to Peter and tries to regain his composure quietly. Some things weren't meant to be remembered.

The second time they leave is the last time for some of them and not the last time for the others, but this time they don't fight the loss of memories so hard. They tell each other the large stories and let the small ones slip into obscurity, maybe because they don't want to remember what the actual faces of the men they killed looked like. It is enough to remember they killed, and won the battle. It is a familiar confusion they slip back into, a blurring of the details and the feeling of something always on the edge of the memory, there but not quite attainable. They learn to live with ambiguity, with telling a story and not remembering the finer intricacies of motive and reasoning and outcome. Life is painted in great sweeping arcs, and they forget.

Lucy calls Susan a month after the third time she has left Narnia, though it has been a long time since Susan has wanted to talk about Narnia at all. "Susan?" she asks. "Remember how you said we should write down all our memories so we wouldn't forget?" Susan shakes her head before realizing it is a phone call and that is not enough. "No," she says, because she doesn't. That detail was forgotten a long time ago. "Well," says Lucy, "I know now why we didn't." Susan purses her lips and wonders if the lipstick color she has on is the right one or not for her skin tone, and doesn't listen to Lucy on the other end struggling with how to remember a world that was always bound to be forgotten.


End file.
